Amazon wants you to use Prime Music, bolsters song catalog considerably

Amazon has announced it has added "hundreds of thousands of songs" to its recently launched Prime Music streaming service, along with "hundreds" of new Prime Playlists.

The company stated:

The newly-added selection includes songs from artists new to the Prime Music catalog, as well as additional tracks from artists already in the Prime Music catalog, such as David Guetta, Al Green, Miles Davis, Kendrick Lamar, Linkin Park, Shakira, Deadmau5, Ella Fitzgerald, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, Neil Young, DJ Snake & Lil Jon, Young the Giant, A$AP Rocky, Elvis, Oasis, Kacey Musgraves, Ray Charles, Panic! at the Disco, Wyclef Jean, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Skrillex, John Coltrane and many more.

Amazon's press release stated that the response to their Prime Music service, which launched on June 12 as a new perk for Amazon Prime subscribers, "has far exceeded our expectations" but didn't go into specifics. At the time of the launch, the company said that there were over a million songs available to stream from Prime Music. It also recently said that Amazon Prime itself had "tens of millions" of subscribers.

What do you think of Amazon adding a bunch of new music tracks to its Prime Music service? Is it worth the $99 a year price for Amazon Prime?

It was a bit weak at last check. With so much competition out there, it might justify $7 of the $99 price tag but I think prime is on its last year with me. Plus, I now pay tax in my state so if I have to wait 2 days for the product, plus pay tax, I might as well just buy it locally. Other local stores have really gotten price competitive with Amazon now anyway

I think the person is talking about the free two day shipping on Amazon.com purchases that comes with Amazon Prime. Depending on the state you live in, you may have to pay sales tax. If the item is available immediately locally for the same price and you have to pay sales tax anyway, you might as well by local.

Yep, Amazon is setting up shipping centers in my state so now we pay in state sales tax for items sold via amazon prime. I get there is a tax debate but the way i felt is that out of state centers are at a disadvantage to local re-sellers because they need to ship my items requiring me to wait. The no tax served to even the playing field for me so sometimes I would endure the 2 day wait for the tax savings. If tax is charged and the prices are the same, why would I want to wait 2 days for something I could pick up today? For things that i'm too lazy to drive to the store for, it makes sense but I find myself using Amazon way less than I used to.

Thanks for the explanation. I feel the very same way. I live outside of the US, in Costa Rica in fact. In order to buy from Amazon I have to send it to a shipping address in Florida, which is a company, they receive the packages and ship they from FL to Costa Rica. Nontheless, I only buy items which are VEEEERY extremely expensive here in Costa Rica or things I cant find, for example a Nexus device, or wireless charges stuff like that.

For us is much much expensive as we have to pay Florida State Tax + shipping and handling until florida. and the company which brings the packages normally also charges by the weight, and Costa Rican governement also charges more tax.

So... you could say that a small thing could have $10 extra, but other things can really get expensive....

Well technically we already should have been keeping track of our online purchases and paying tax on them if our state charges sales tax at all. But most aren't aware or don't care about this (including me). Having said that, I feel like $99 was already worth it to me and having Amazon Music is just icing. The app has worked alright for me so far.

I agree with everything dswatson83 said. That being said, I might consider keeping Prime if they offered an option for the original price and just leave out the music and video streaming. I just feel like I'm paying extra for stuff I don't use.

Pandora does not count against my data usage on TMo; I do think Amazon's service does. I use Pandora in the car on the way to work where obviously Wifi isn't an option. 40 minutes in the car, each way, 5 days a week...and my data usage can climb pretty quickly.

I do have Prime already, but haven't given this a chance given my streaming music need is fulfilled already between Pandora and iHeart

Pretty sure they know about that. Not the same thing. For one, we don't all have enough space to store all of our music on our phones. For another, we don't always know what we want to listen to before we leave for the day. Music streaming is much more convenient.

Amazon Prime is about the shipping for me. I do the math and come out ahead-ish. At least for 2 days shipping I come out ahead without a doubt.
If they want to be truly competitive they need to give us android apps. Until then it is just a gimmick and I could care less about the content that I do not have access to.

Actually, the Amazon Music app for Android does already support Prime Music, but I find myself using my Google Play subscription more often. The UI is so much better than the Amazon app and the selection of music is better as well. Supposedly there's a Prime Instant Video app for Android forthcoming. I'll be happy to finally have that one.

The new app is unusable on my Nexus 5.. Deleted all my playlists & won't update any changes whenever I edit albums in my file explorer. I had to find the apk to the old version & revert back to that. Works much better. I'll never update it again.

The lackluster song catalog is only part of the problem I have with Prime Music. The interface is also unintuitive (not to mention ugly), which is a big problem considering that I mostly stream music while driving, and UI makes a big difference when you often only have a few seconds at a stoplight to switch between albums. Also, there's no Chromecast support, which I use a lot with Google Play.

It's good to see that they're working on it, though. I pay for Prime anyway (even at the new price, I order enough stuff from Amazon that it's more than worth it for the shipping alone), so if they can fix those issues, I'll ditch Google Play in a heartbeat and save myself $120/year.

I don't think Amazon is in any hurry to bring video to Google for obvious reasons. But about the music:
As an old fogie, I don't do "playlists" or listen to "songs." I play entire albums. Also, I listen primarily to Jazz and Blues - notoriously hard to find. In that area, AMZ is as good as anybody.
I stream music from an old Gnex through a very basic stereo system on my porch with good results. I do Pandora, TuneIn, Slacker and various proprietary radio apps. The sound quality from AMZ is noticeably better than all of them.
Considering I was tetering about the Prime price increase, this justified it for me. Win - win.

I use it.
i have like 20+ albums added to it already.
Now if only T-Mo would add it to the list of services it doesn't count towards your data I could drop unlimited for 3GB.
Majority of my data is Google Play music and Amazon Music

I think it's definitely a benefit to the existing Amazon prime members. Not sure if it would really be a deciding point on whether yo get prime or not though. For me it's an added bonus since I was already a prime member.

I live in FL, and now pay sales tax on Amazon purchases. I still find most items cheaper on Amazon. Just scan the barcode to find out if it's cheaper. I make multiple purchases, so I'm saving more on shipping costs than the cost of Prime. Amazon's distribution center is very close (some purchases show up the next day), so unless I need it immediately, I'd rather save the money and wait a couple of days.

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